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AutoCAD for PV/Solar System Design


rkshrest

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Hi everyone.

 

I am an undergraduate student in Electrical Engineering in New Orleans. How do you suggest me to self-learn the AutoCAD specifically for solar design, to be able to say I know it during an interview? I have no prior CAD experience. Thanks!

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Well sir you can tell an interviewer anything you like but when the rubber meets the road, it won't matter what you told them, it will only matter what you can do for them that will produce revenue.

 

As for self-learning AutoCAD, that's the easy part. Just make up your mind that you're going to learn it and then start doing google and yahoo searches for AutoCAD tutorials. There's loads of information out there and if you apply yourself and reinforce what you learn you will be come proficient with CAD in a short time. If you're just beginning then I also suggest you learn as much as you can about orthographic drawing techniques. I won't tell you that it takes years, but I can tell you it won't happen overnight.

 

Now to address your point on PV...there are two aspects of this science. The electronics side and the structural side. The electronics side is fairly simple but you would want a tool which works with that science like AutoCAD Electrical. Then for the structural side of it you might want to look at plan old AutoCAD or Revit....and of course you could do the whole thing with plain vanilla AutoCAD, but you'd be limited on what you can do compared to what the specialized products can do. There are other vendors besides AutoDesk you can investigate as well.

 

My best advice would be to study about blue print creation and reading, then get a Student copy of AutoCAD (totally free for students of all ages) and get started reading, studying and practicing. If you have the time and the $$$ you can take a course in CAD at your local community college or pay for an online course. But how fast and how well you learn is all up to you.

 

Good luck.

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There might be a more proprietary software out there. AutoCAD is simply an extension of the drafting board. There are a number of trade-specific CAD and Engineering applications out there nowadays, that are directly related to certain industries. I haven't heard of PV/Solar System Design talked about much on this board - if at all.

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PV is an amazing science. I marvel at watching electrical current being created from just sunlight. And did you know that more energy from the sun hits the land mass of the USA in just one day than is needed to power the entire earth for one year. But we can't harness that energy efficiently, not yet anyway.

 

I did some research on this last year and for about $500 investment you can setup a battery-less system which will crank out about $0.45 per day of electricity for you. That's based on the current $/Kwh and if the sun shines all day. So it takes years to amoritize your investment. PV will be part of our energy source but the science has a long way to go yet....unless the Iranians screw everything up and force oil up to $500 per barrel, which they are well on their way to doing.

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Hi,

 

The solar industry has some specific tools that would help you to do designs and energy productions estimates. There is a cool tool called Skelion... it is a plugin for Google SketchUp. This tool allows you to insert solar panels on surfaces according to your design parameters such as tilt, azimuth and type of solar panel. You can get solar energy production estimates also. I think with Google SketchUp you can export the drawing to AutoCAD.

 

Check it out:thumbsup:: http://www.skelion.net

 

Good luck!

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  • 2 months later...

Hello,

 

I'm in the process of creating a portal for solar designers called design4solar.com. I started by creating a class on AutoCAD for Solar, I still offer it in an online format. I have a lot more content planned. Check it out and let me know what I can do to help.

 

Gary

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